The individual pieces that make up the Dark Side workstation are Fuzz, Delay and Modulation. The Fuzz side of the Dark Side is a big fuzz style distortion based on a 1977 op-amp style. Keeley made what seemed like endless changes to extract the nuances of earlier transistor based fuzzes, dialing it way to down to fit the time period and the style. This is a more transparent Big Fuzz. This one lets your guitar sing with sustain, yet retains the essence of you guitar whether single coil or humbucker based.
The next core element in the Dark Side pedal is the Delay and Modulation side. You can select between a multi-head tape delay effect or between a combination of 4 different modulation sounds. The Dark Side delay also has 12 different syncopated delays. They are rhythmic and have the tonal quality of the old spinning drum tape delays. The Dark Side uses many subtle filters to get the tape delay setting to have the feel and warmth of the original machines, yet gives you range of control to have modern features like expression pedal control for the number of repeats. You can even use it for creating a feedback oscillation delay. Extremely subtle modulations in the delay make it very musical.
The next atom in this workstation is the modulation effect. There are four parts to this effect, Flanger, Rotary Speaker Cabinet, U-Vibe, and Phaser. You can blend between the “Electric Lady” Flanger and a Les-Rotary cabinet, creating new sounds. You can find that perfect blend between a vintage sounding opto-coupler based U-Vibe and the little orange phaser.
There is also an Expression Pedal port on the pedal allowing adjustments on the fly that just increase the fun and functionality of the pedal while you’re creating music, but it has to be a TRS style expression pedal.
At the heart of the Dark Side is a hand-built board that contains analog fuzz and a high quality 24-bit DSP engine. Keeley studied and analyzed decades worth of gear and crafted their own sounds that give you not only the original tones, but an endless range of in-between sounds you can’t get anywhere else. Even if you have other Keeley effects or workstations, you don’t have these exact sounds. The Rotary is slightly different than the Monterey, it’s more chorus like. The Flanger is different than the hidden one on the Bubble Tron. The U-Vibe on this pedal is also deeper and throbs with more intensity. If you were lucky enough to get one of the Jimi Hazel Phase Delays or put the Bubble Tron into the hidden bank 2 mode; well then you have heard the Keeley 4 stage phaser. It’s dead on and a blast to play. Like the Monterey, this unit is completely hand built, including the high-end DSP, by technicians with decades of experience. Attention to detail and tone at every point!
What you get is a Mother Lode of effects and sounds. Necessity is the Mother of Invention. Someone needed to put all these epic sounds in one box, so Keeley did. There’s no need to wish you were here, get out your Strat and we'll see you on the Dark Side.
